Deadly Pleasures

By Martin Edwards

To celebrate the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Jubilee, a collection of original stories from distinguished members of the CWA especially commissioned for this volume
An eclectic collection of short stories from the following members of the CWA: SIMON BRETT ANN CLEEVES LIZA CODY LINDSEY DAVIS MARTIN EDWARDS RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS CHRISTOPHER FOWLER JOHN HARVEY DAVID HEWSON ALISON JOSEPH PETER LOVESEY CLAIRE McGOWAN MICHAEL RIDPATH PETER ROBINSON CATH STAINCLIFFE ANDREW TAYLOR CHARLES TODD MARGARET YORKE

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781780104478

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This year sees the Crime Writers’ Association reach its Diamond Jubilee, and this anthology celebrates that notable anniversary in a suitably murderous way. From humble beginnings, when John Creasey convened a meeting of fellow mystery writers, and a dozen people who attended at the National Liberal Club on Guy Fawkes’ Night in 1953 agreed to form the Association, the CWA has grown in size and reputation, so much so that today, it numbers in its ranks many of the world’s leading authors of popular fiction. And it’s good to know that John’s son Richard is now himself a member of the CWA.

The distinguished list of contributors to this anthology includes a host of award-winners. Many are writers whose novels have been turned into highly successful TV series, such as DCI Banks, Vera, Blue Murder, Cribb, Resnick, Anna Lee, Fallen Angel and Shetland, while David Hewson has reversed the process by writing novels based on the Danish TV series The Killing. The generosity of these very busy people, who have taken the time to write original stories for the book despite their countless other commitments, speaks volumes for the affection and loyalty that the CWA inspires.

As usual with CWA anthologies, I’ve been keen to include stories by a number of authors who have not previously contributed to the series. And they have come up with some wonderful stories, as well as offering readers a chance to catch up with several of their favourite characters. Fans of Bryant and May, Jack Kiley, Inspector Rutledge and Michael Ridpath’s Icelandic books are in for a real treat. Those, like me, who mourn the long-time absence from the bookshelves of that terrific character Anna Lee will find a clue to her fate – or perhaps it is a red herring? – in Liza Cody’s contribution. There is a story from a talented newcomer to the genre, Claire McGowan, and as well as that Rutledge mystery from one (or rather two!) of the CWA’s overseas members, the American mother and son partnership who write together as Charles Todd.

John Harvey’s story is a fascinating take on a highly topical and difficult criminal subject, while Lindsey Davis has written a story which is a sort of companion piece to her contribution to the CWA’s Golden Jubilee anthology, Mysterious Pleasures. Peter Robinson’s story began life in a different form, as a piece for performance by Peter, alongside the legendary Martin Carthy, at the Beverley Folk Festival last year. The collection as a whole demonstrates the wide and exciting range of modern crime writing. The book offers police detectives and private eyes, humour and history, poignancy and psychological suspense. And … well, as you will see, there are plenty of tales of the unexpected.

My original plan for this anthology was that, in reflecting the vibrancy of the current crime fiction scene, and of the CWA, it should contain nothing but brand new stories. Whilst the book was in the course of preparation, however, the CWA lost one of its most senior and distinguished members, and a former Chair, Margaret Yorke. Margaret, who died late in 2012, was not only one of the most gifted modern practitioners of psychological suspense in a domestic, but distinctly uncosy, setting, but also a staunch supporter of the CWA. She was an accomplished short story writer and had contributed to CWA anthologies in the past, most recently at the time of our Golden Jubilee. I felt it would be a fitting tribute to include one of her stories, which had previously reached only a limited readership, and I am very glad that her family not only agreed, but took the trouble to read through Margaret’s stories, and choose one which they felt was a suitable example of her gifts.

It scarcely seems credible that ten years have passed since I edited the CWA’s Golden Jubilee anthology, Mysterious Pleasures. The title of this collection, shared with an excellent American magazine edited by George Easter, again reflects the pleasures that fictional crime can offer. And for me, as editor, being the first person to read the stories written by so many superb writers has proved especially enjoyable.

My thanks go to all the contributors, and to Margaret’s family, for their kindness in helping to make this book possible. I’m also grateful to Edwin Buckhalter and his colleagues at Severn House for their support for the project, and to Peter James for his foreword. The result is a collection which will, I feel sure, give countless readers pleasure.

Martin Edwards

THE FRAME

Simon Brett

Simon Brett is the author of crime series featuring the actor Charles Paris and Mrs Pargeter as well as the Fethering Mysteries. His stand-alone novels include A Shock to the System, which was filmed with Michael Caine. As a writer for radio, he has been responsible for No Commitments and After Henry, which transferred to television. He is a former chair of the CWA and current President of the Detection Club.

Time was running out for Jake Parlane. It had nearly run out many times before, but this was a situation he couldn’t shoot his way out of. Fact was, he was getting old.

Old and respectable, mind. A respectable citizen of Ruthville, California. He’d heard it said that the United States of America was the ‘Land of Opportunity’ where anyone could reinvent themselves quicker than a rattlesnake’s strike. And anything that was true of the United States was even more true in the Wild West.

He’d never blamed himself for the crimes committed in the early part of his life. With an upbringing like his, what else could a boy do? Also it had been an escape from the bullying evangelism of his father. All he could remember from his childhood was hard work and biblical quotation. His parents had been part of an early wave of pioneers from the East, trying to make a better living in the newest ‘Land of Opportunity’.

Jake had been only four when they hit the trail, so he had the haziest recollection of the journey. But from the few things his mother had been allowed to say, it had been tough. She was never allowed to complain, though. In her husband’s eyes complaint amounted to criticism of the Almighty. Though it was he who had made the decision to go West, it was not his plan but God’s they were following. And if God chose to bring hardship their way … well, they must just put up with it.

God did bring a lot of hardship their way. Only in the disillusionment of his teens, when he ceased to believe in parental infallibility, did Jake realise how his father must have been duped about the quality of the land he’d bought. Nearby them were riverside ranches with lush pasture whose owners stacked up the cash, but to make a living from the Parlanes’ few acres of dust and scrub was virtually impossible. The earth was too shallow to produce anything but stunted crops, the greenery too sparse to support the family’s emaciated cattle. ‘Subsistence farming’ was too good a description of what went on at the Parlanes’. When he bought the property, Jake’s father had been shaken down like a country hick in a city casino.

Not that he would ever accept that unalterable fact. For him crop failure after crop failure just meant that the family was not working hard enough to realise the plan that God had so generously devised for them. Setbacks only gave out one message: they had to work harder.

And that meant everyone. The day after they arrived on their plot four-year-old Jake was set to work on the endless task of picking stones out of the areas designated for cultivation. And the same fate of back-breaking toil awaited the sequence of brothers and sisters who sprang with such regularity from the womb of his exhausted mother. They all worked all the time.

Their day of rest was Sunday. And that was a rest only from physical labour. Jake’s father, by continued Bible readings and prayers, turned the day into one long church service. But not in church. Though there was a mission a mere two miles away, the Parlane family never went there. The patriarch preferred his own version of Christianity to any existing form. And he preferred the company of his own family to seeing people he didn’t know. No one ever came to visit the Parlane farm. It was only later in life that Jake realised his father had been completely mad.

It was ironical that, in the vast empty spaces of California, the dominant feeling of the teenage Jake was one of claustrophobia. He was locked as firmly into the routines dictated by his father as he ever would be in a prison cell. And it was in hopes of escaping his incarceration that, at the age of eighteen, he stole his first horse.

A horse represented freedom. From his home he could see the buckaroos roaming unfettered, rounding up cattle on the distant plains. He watched the Wells Fargo stagecoaches, raising clouds of dust as they charged past the drooping locked gates of the Parlane farm. Everyone else was going somewhere. If he had a horse he could go somewhere too.

Of course Jake had no skills as a horse thief. No skills as a horse rider either. That was what was really pathetic about his theft. He tried plenty of times, but he never even managed to get up on the horse’s back before the local sheriff was out calling at the Parlane farm.

And then all hell broke loose. Jake’s father was not only furious that his son had been guilty of a crime; what seemed to irk him more was that this criminal behaviour had brought outsiders into their private compound. He disowned his son on the spot, telling Jake he’d never be welcome in the family home again (which was not without its irony, because he’d never felt welcome there in the first place).

Maybe with parental support at his trial Jake Parlane would not have got such a stiff sentence. Maybe not. Horses were what kept the local economy going back then and stealing one was regarded as a pretty serious crime. The owner of the horse Jake stole reckoned the five years the boy got handed down was too lenient.

Jails back then weren’t fancy places. Men were there to be punished and a lot of the punishment came from other prisoners. Much of what happened during those five years Jake just blanked out. One thing for sure, though, prison was a brutalising experience. The experience that led to his life of crime. You came out of prison hating the world and wanting revenge on it. So he didn’t feel guilty about any of what came after.

Jake Parlane sat back in his leather armchair and sipped at the fine bourbon in its cut glass tumbler. The matching decanter stood on the table at his side, just where Aaron had left it. Jake looked across the veranda and beyond his garden to the neat little town of Ruthville, where the evening lights were beginning to come on. And he thought back to the past.

Back to the whisky they all drank then. God, it was rough. Didn’t do to ask too much detail about how it was made. Not like this smooth, oh so smooth, bourbon that was as delicate as a breeze on a cornfield.

And he thought of Ruthville back then. It was a joke. Not just the place, the clumsy dusty assemblage of unfinished wooden huts, but the name, that was a joke. Ruthville. Named after Ruth, the broad-limbed – and broad-minded – Irish madam who supplied the girls in a shed that couldn’t aspire to the title of a brothel. The place was named for her as a joke. The joke was forgotten, but as the town became respectable the name stuck. Jake Parlane chuckled. He wondered how the new pastor who’d just taken up his post in the gleaming just-completed Ruthville Episcopal Church would react if he knew where the name came from. (He also enjoyed the irony of the pastor not knowing the provenance of the large contribution to the church building fund made by respectable parishioner Jake Parlane.)

Thinking of Ruth made Jake remember good times spent with her. And with some of her charges. Quite a lot of her charges. Back in the days when that kind of thing mattered.

His eyes homed back in on the frame. The ornate carved frame that stood on his fancy writing desk. The frame that had once contained the photographic image of Jake Junior.

And he thought again of the bullion secure in his cellar. And where he wanted it to go when he was no longer around.

Jake Parlane felt a pain in his gut. He took a long swallow of bourbon, and that numbed the griping. For a while. But he knew the time would come – and not too far away – when even whisky wouldn’t kill the pain.

Yup, time was running out.

If Jake Parlane was going to see through the plan that had been forming in his mind for some months, soon he’d have to make a start.

He’d lost count of how many people he’d killed. Never kept a tally. He’d just done what was necessary for the job in hand. And if that involved someone dying … well, everyone in his trade took the same risks. The next day Jake Parlane could be the one who got shot.

The Black Cross Gang. Most of them had served time in prison. Most had the same desire as Jake to be revenged on the world that had put them there. The polite world of small-minded men who thought about town planning and worried about keeping their neighbourhoods ‘respectable’.

Funny that in later life Jake Parlane should have joined their ranks. The bullion he had stolen was worth more than he could ever spend. And, as shoot-out followed shoot-out, there were less of the Black Cross Gang claiming a share. When gang members died, it didn’t worry Jake Parlane much. They were just gunslingers with whom he’d drunk rough whisky, shared danger, shared jokes – and sometimes women. But they were guys who knew the risks. Nothing to get sentimental about.

Jake Junior, though, that’d been different. He’d never been sentimental about the boy growing up, had no interest in him until he could hold his own with a six-shooter. And even then the boy was no damn use, too much of a dreamer. When he was allowed to join them, so far as his Paw was concerned, Jake Junior was just another member of the Black Cross Gang. And not one of the best members. Never going to match up to the exploits of his Paw.

And Jake Junior’s death was kind of his own damn fault. The boy had been on reconnaissance duty, detailed to check out how the land lay at the River Crossing Bank. And he hadn’t done a good job, dreaming as ever. Otherwise he’d have known that when the horse team had been attached by ropes to the window and pulled it away – along with half the wall – they’d find the bank full of the River Crossing sheriff’s men with guns blazing.

The Black Cross Gang lost a lot of men that day. Including Jake Junior. Served the little damn fool right.

But Jake Parlane had been surprised by how much the death affected him. Not right away, but kind of gradually. He let the boy’s mother do all the weeping and wailing for the first few months. Her feebleness made him downright angry. She kept cradling that ornate wooden frame with the picture she’d had done of the boy by some huckster with a camera. Cradling it and weeping. Jake kept saying the kid would never have amounted to much, but that didn’t stop her. Her constant tears got on his nerves. Finally, in a fit of fury he’d ripped the photograph out of the frame and torn it to shreds. That had, needless to say, prompted more weeping and wailing.

It was only after he’d destroyed the boy’s image that he started to miss Jake Junior. Never told the boy’s mother, of course. Jake Parlane had learned in prison how not to show pain. And, anyway, she died a few months later. Sentimental folks might have said her end was hastened by their son’s death. But Jake Parlane didn’t mix with sentimental folks, so he never heard them saying it.

Somehow doing the jobs the Black Cross Gang had always done didn’t seem so satisfying with the boy gone. Not that Jake Junior had been the only one who’d been lost at River Crossing. The Black Cross Gang’s numbers were down. Also, the lawmen were starting to show their first signs of efficiency. The banks and mail coaches were getting better security. Robbing them wasn’t quite so much fun anymore.

One last job and maybe it’d be time for Jake Parlane to hang up his boots. Even to become a respectable burgher of the clean, expanding town of Ruthville. He’d always known he could buy respectability there. Pump enough money into a few civic projects, pay for the construction of the schoolhouse, contribute handsomely to the building fund for the Episcopal Church … that’d do the trick. Reinventing oneself was still easy in the US of A. Most everyone in the West had a background to hide, and nothing hid it more efficiently than money.

One last job then. For many years Jake Parlane had been planning a raid on the Wells Fargo office in Santa Veronica. Now the moment had arrived to put his plans into action.

Then he’d change his life. Forget the Black Cross Gang. Forget Jake Junior’s mother. Forget Jake Junior.

But even after he’d done the job he never threw away the wooden frame that had held his son’s photograph.

When Jake Parlane started planning the Santa Veronica job, he knew it was going to be different. In the old days a bank raid hadn’t needed much finesse. Only research you needed to do was have a gang member check the comings and goings of stagecoaches to the bank. Pretty soon your man got to recognise the ones that were delivering coins or bullion.

Way you got in was usually by pulling out a barred window – and often the whole wall – with the horse train. Just like they’d done at River Crossing. Six horses in harness – sometimes stolen off Wells Fargo – but they didn’t have a stagecoach to pull, just hooks attached to the window bars. Fix them up, and firing a few shots from your Colt near the horses’ feet usually got them moving real fast. Not many windows could resist that kind of force. As a kind of private joke, members of the Black Cross Gang referred to the procedure as the ‘Wells Fargo method’.

Jake Parlane was always present when they were doing a job, but he let Aaron take charge of the actual break-in. A former slave who’d survived the Civil War, Aaron was ageless and tough as ebony. He’d served his time in prison too and, though he’d been brutalised by the experience, he was fiercely loyal to Jake.

In the event you didn’t have a team of horses to hand for the Wells Fargo method, you just chucked in a couple of lighted dynamite sticks. That usually brought the bank managers and tellers out in a state more than ready to hand over the keys to the strong room. Any who resisted got shot. Then the Black Cross Gang loaded up with the coins or bullion and hightailed back to their hideout.

But the Santa Veronica job was going to take more preparation than that. Wells Fargo were getting cannier all the time with their security. They had more men riding shotgun on their stagecoaches and they were making their buildings more robust. What had once been wooden structures were now stone and brick. It’d take more than a team of six horses to pull a window out of their new Santa Veronica office.

For the first time in his career Jake Parlane required the services of someone on the inside.

Finding the right guy didn’t prove too difficult. Aaron was despatched to do a bit of scouting round the Santa Veronica saloons. Back then the landlords weren’t too fussy about the colour of a man’s skin. It was the colour of his money they worried about. And Aaron always seemed to have plenty of that.

So he lounged around the bars, almost unnoticed, steadily drinking rough whisky, his dark eyes beneath their hooded lids taking in everything. Occasionally he would engage some loose mouth in conversation. He always chose the drunks, who were less likely to remember the direction of his questions and more likely to be indiscreet in supplying him with information.

He discovered that the agent who ran the Santa Veronica Wells Fargo office was called Colonel Tuckett. He apparently said he’d been promoted to that rank in the Union Army during the Civil War, but local opinion doubted the claim. Rumour also maintained that he didn’t attain the standard of incorruptibility required by Wells Fargo in their agents. Loans he organised through the company usually involved kickbacks for himself. Tuckett was also a strong supporter of Santa Veronica’s saloons and brothels, where his transactions were rumoured not to involve money changing hands.

When Aaron reported his findings, Jake Parlane knew they’d got their man. All they needed to do was to sort out the deal with him. Aaron was despatched back to Santa Veronica to carry out the next stage of the plan.

It was easy. Aaron followed the oblivious Colonel Tuckett after he’d locked up the Wells Fargo office for the night. The agent didn’t mount his horse but led it, suggesting he wasn’t going far. Sure enough, the animal was tied up outside a saloon and, about an hour later, led to Santa Veronica’s most popular brothel. Colonel Tuckett’s business only detained him there half an hour, and he returned to his horse in the empty evening street to find himself confronted by a tall black man pointing a Colt in his face.

When Aaron suggested they ride out of town together, the agent was too scared to disagree. Nor did he make any demur when the former slave insisted on blindfolding him and leading his horse the last couple of miles to the Black Cross Gang hideout.

When the blindfold was removed Colonel Tuckett found himself facing Jake Parlane, behind a table on which were a bottle of rather good bourbon and two glasses. Coercion always remained a potential threat, but the gang leader thought he’d try the soft approach first.

And he found the Wells Fargo agent very amenable to his suggestions. Fright and greed proved to be a very successful combination. Colonel Tuckett seemed to be moved less by the implicit threat of violence against his person than by the prospect of creaming off a bit of the loot for himself.

He agreed readily to notify Jake when the next consignment of gold coins and bullion was due into the office. And he agreed to being tied up at his desk the night when the Black Cross Gang broke in.

‘But that does raise a point, Jake.’ He and Parlane were already on first name terms, Jake and Clinton. ‘Breaking into the new office ain’t going to be so easy. That place is built to last.’

‘Dynamite?’ his host suggested.

The agent wrinkled his face in wry disapproval. ‘Seems a pity to destroy a new building.’ He was clearly rather proud of his workplace.

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘Simplest thing would be – I unlock the front door and you come in.’

‘Suits me.’ Jake Parlane grinned. ‘Might give you a bit of an explanation